


things we lost in the fire

by lachambre11



Series: Things That Got Lost Along The Way [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Age Difference, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Gen, I know, Other, Slow Burn, but I just love them, like the slowest of burns, no beta we die like men, teddy and lily live rent-free in my head for years and I won't apologize for it
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-27
Updated: 2021-02-27
Packaged: 2021-03-19 02:00:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,476
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29743269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lachambre11/pseuds/lachambre11
Summary: “There is a crack, a crack in everything.That’s how the light gets in”.- OR -Lily Luna Potter grows up in a hurry, like James and Albus never did.She grows up beautiful and dizzying and a liar. Nobody ever saw that last part coming from a Potter, but a small handful of people saw it coming from her.
Relationships: Harry Potter/Ginny Weasley, Hermione Granger/Ron Weasley, Lily Luna Potter/Lysander Scamander, Lorcan Scamander/Roxanne Weasley, Minor or Background Relationship(s), Teddy Lupin/Lily Luna Potter, Teddy Lupin/Victoire Weasley
Series: Things That Got Lost Along The Way [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/28834
Comments: 1
Kudos: 4





	things we lost in the fire

**Author's Note:**

> aka the alternative version and Lily's POV for my 'things that got lost in the dark' story.  
> But you don't have to read that for this one to make sense, ok? They're sort of like third cousins - distantly related.
> 
> Also, in my house we don't acknowledge The Cursed Child okay, bye bye now.

~*~

Lily Luna Potter grows up in a hurry, like James and Albus never did.

She grows up beautiful and dizzying and a liar. Nobody ever saw that last part coming from a Potter, but a small handful of people saw it coming from her.

~*~

It starts maybe when she’s seven or eight years old, it’s hard to remember exactly the time and the place, except –

She’s holding a candle on one hand, the flame flickering on the other, and somewhere along the way, somehow, her brain decides that the logical thing to do would be put those two together.

It’s the first, but not the last time, that she starts a fire.

~*~

Teddy tells her once, when she’s about to leave for Hogwarts and they’re about to start something that she had idea that it would involve so many tears and blood and shame – he looks her straight in the eye and says:

“You don’t have to be anything except who you are, Lily”.

She used to believe him, back then.

He had never been so wrong in his life.

~* ~

If there was one thing that Lily Luna Potter figured out early in her life, apart from how to watch and smile as everything around her burned to the ground, was that she would never truly get the chance to be whoever she wanted to be.

That was from decided from the moment a Healer said, “it’s a girl”, and the whole world knew that she was Harry Potter’s only daughter.

~*~

The Sorting Hat feels heavy on her head.

“I don’t know what to do with you”, he tells her, and there’s bafflement and indignation in his tone. “I could place you anywhere. Any house would suit you”.

But what he doesn’t know is that this, too, was never an option for her.

“Gryffindor”, she thinks, and he pauses.

“Gryffindor” Lily repeats, and already, at nearly twelve years old, there’s this kind of determination in her thoughts that will only grow stronger with time and maturity.

“It is a brave choice for a brave heart, even if not exactly a wise one”, he comments, before announcing to everyone what they had already expected to hear once the headmistress called her name.

She smiles and it doesn’t look false because it’s not.

Not entirely.

There’s satisfaction in control.

~*~

Lily does everything she’s supposed to do.

She could be the at top of her classes, she’s got the brains and the discipline for that, but she makes sure to fall just under Hugo, as expected.

He’s the one that’s supposed to be the genius, the one that's following into the footsteps of his sister and their mother.

She’s generally well behaved, but makes sure to slip here and there, just enough to ear no more than a couple of detentions per school year. Just enough to make people whisper about James Potter’s granddaughter, and how she’s living up to his name, while still being considered a good girl.

It’s important to never lose sight of that balance.

Her teachers, especially Neville, write to her parents about how Lily is well adjusted and making the most out of her Hogwarts years. She makes the right friends and is seen with the right people, and it’s only slightly grating, going through the motions of what little Lily Potter’s life is supposed to look like.

Her mother sends her weekly letters with words of encouragement and love, as well as family gossip. Her father sends her awkward gifts and notes with coded messages, in the language that they invented when she was seven and hung to his every word. She takes pleasure in figuring it out and putting it together because it feels like this is something that’s just for the two of them.

They always start with “my dearest moonbeam” and end with “lots of love”.

It’s one of the few parts of her life that she actually enjoys.

~* ~

She lets her hair grow long, below her shoulder blades and stopping just short of her waist, like her mum used to wear it. It could’ve been a perfect replica if her hair were auburn instead of copper, and if it hung straight and silky down her back instead of thick and wavy, but she hadn’t learned how to beat genetics. 

She wears glasses, thick black frames that hide her dark blue eyes. They’re not her dad’s infamous green, or her mother’s light brown ones. There’s no point in emphasizing them for other people to notice because they don’t remind them of anyone.

She never pierces her ears, though. That’s the place of her body she keeps to herself, while the rest remains for public consumption.

~*~

They watch and gossip about her. At first it angers her, the eyes that follow anywhere, waiting to see a mistake, a crack in the armour, anything they can use to tear into.

What they don’t see is how she’s determined not to give them the satisfaction.

Then it comes a time when she gets so used to the stares that they barely register anymore, become just another thing that comes along with being a Potter.

~*~

Roxanne is one of the people who always watch her, and always in silence.

It makes Lily restless, the calculating gaze of her older cousin trained on her whenever they cross paths.

It’s almost as if Roxanne’s cataloguing everything there is to know about Lily and analysing those traits in private; as if she’s looking for the secret place where she can slip her fingers inside and find tender, freshly scrubbed flesh that she can prod and manoeuvre to her liking. 

Her cousin is everything she’s not. Her figure is tall and commanding whereas Lily is 5’3’’ and just as petite as her mother used to be. Roxanne has short, dark hair curling around strong cheekbones, dimples that deceive people into thinking of her as sweet instead of the lethal creature she is. She has a brilliant face, one that could launch a thousand ships if she wished to, so unique that makes everyone stop and stare when she walks into a room.

The otherworldly effect is completed with her eyes, witchy and feline and big, made of the lightest shade of green and framed by thick lashes. Her skin is a revelation, a rich, deep brown that’s clear and unblemished whereas Lily’s is pale and freckled. She only answers to Roxanne, and never to Weasley. She enjoys her popularity immensely, revels in the way people stare at her whenever she goes, dazzled and uncertain of whether they should hate or worship the ground she walks on.

Roxanne knows the power she has over people, and she uses it whenever she pleases.

And Lily? Well, Lily Potter is supposed to be anything but lethal.

She’s not a breath-taking beauty, like Roxanne, nor sin personified, like Victoire. She’s not the approachable cute one, like Lucy, or the serious, bookish fiend like Molly. She never quite managed to summon up enough enthusiasm or talent to be a Quidditch prodigy, so this role falls to Dominique and, later on, to Rose.

You see, Lily never wants to be seen, or observed, or even remembered at all, not any more than she already was. So, she acted as unassuming and quiet as possible, to the point of being rendered as invisible as she could be while still being Harry Potter’s daughter. Her unsmiling mouth, her serious but kind eyes, it all got her a reputation for being the steadfast one, the reserved one whom you could always count to listen and never talk. People kept looking for her for advice, for an ear to listen to them unburden their fears, their secrets, because she was not seen as a threat to anyone - with time, she was barely seen at all.

Her appearance helped – when she was little and still wore bangs covering half her face, her Aunt Hermione used to call her ‘my tiny fairy’, which made Uncle Ron laugh because her aunt was no amazon herself, unlike their towering children. Lily had always been on the smaller side, like her grandma Molly, her features a wispy thing - a delicate, upturned nose, a heart-shaped face, almond-shaped eyes and a pouting mouth that sometimes looked out of place in such a disarming face. Childlike, pointy ears with thin, long hands and those knobby Potter knees. Those who knew both said that she has her namesake’s smile, but she rarely deployed its full effect.

At school, she only goes by Potter, prefers it instead of the familiarity of her first name, and shies away from the spotlight even though it follows her around regardless. Still, she’s everyone’s confidant, and that helps to ease the sting of genetic infamy. People on her year look out for her, defend her, diffuse half-formed rumours before they even begin to take flight. She’s quiet and she listens, and most of all, she keeps every secret that’s given to her like treasures buried deep within her chest.

Roxanne and Albus are proud Slytherins, the only ones in the family, and her cousin particularly wears her house colours like a badge of pride. Molly had always been a fated Ravenclaw, while Lucy cheerfully became the first Weasley in Hufflepuff in centuries and the rest of her cousins took over Gryffindor Tower.

Lily merely accepts that her red scarf clashes horribly with her hair, and never sums up enough enthusiasm for her House or truly identifies with it.

She thought that it was a small price to pay for keeping things calm and in balance.

Even if she sometimes thinks the green might’ve suited her better.

~*~

She’s made prefect by the fifth year, and Head Girl by the seventh.

Everybody’s proud. Everybody’s happy.

Sometimes, at night, Lily closes her eyes and pretends she’s just as happy as well.

Sometimes, on those nights, she even manages to convince herself.

That’s how good of an actress she is.

~*~

There’s one thing she actually does that is not because it is what’s expected of her – or, rather, two things.

The first one is a daily event. At the evenings, before dinner, she spends one and a half hour unaccounted for. She does that for seven years, always with a failsafe excuse to explain her absence during that time whenever somebody questioned it.

Since she’s always been vague and reluctant to share information, always deflecting, people eventually stop trying to figure it out.

But she’s there every night; in the room she had heard so much about during her childhood years. She makes that place hers, reclaims it and suits it to her desires. In there, she’s no longer the only daughter of the Saviour of the World. She’s not the offspring of the youngest Chaser to ever win a World Cup. She’s not the littlest Potter either, nor the byproduct of the Wizarding World’s most beloved couple.

She’s nothing and no one inside that room – nothing and no one except _herself_.

There are no other expectations in those moments beyond getting the steps right – there’s a pas the bourrée, then a développé, and maybe even a grand jeté.

Inside that room she gives herself to the music with everything she’s got, throws herself into it, exposes all the things she keeps at bay when she’s outside.

It is in those moments that she feels truly alive.

And suddenly, after that one hour and a half, it’s over.

So she puts herself together and starts pretending again.

~* ~

The other thing is so private that she tries to hide it even from herself.

It’s a little shameful, and maybe a bit foolish.

But she indulges in it. There’s satisfaction in unveiling little parts of herself piece by piece, in putting the words to paper. She can’t stop writing back to Teddy. In those letters, she’s honest in a way she never allows herself to be with anyone, not even to herself. She puts pen to paper and, suddenly, she bares herself to him without hesitation.

Teddy had always been the one person that she never shied away from.

Those letters grow more personal and conflicted as she grows older, as she comes into her own. And along with it grows the feeling inside her gut that says that someday this, too, will come crashing down around her. Maybe that’s why she burns every letter she ever gets from him in return, just to make a point.

What kind of point is the thing she’s not exactly sure of.

~*~

One night, when she’s fifteen, she lets herself think about him for the first time in the way that she truly wanted to. She lets the boundaries she had placed on their interactions fall away, and truly thinks about the way he makes her _feel._

She thinks about the way he smiles at her across the table in her parent’s house, private and sweet, as if it’s just for her. She thinks about the way he touches her at random, a kiss on the top of her head, fingers brushing her shoulders, like it’s easy, like it’s habit. Like it’s not burning her from inside out.

She thinks about the way her pulse quickens and her throat dries out when he does that. She thinks about those dark grey eyes of his, the elegant slope of his nose, the force behind those sharp, Black family cheekbones, and the suggested softness behind his full lips. She thinks about his ever-changing hair, and how it simultaneously irritates and endears her to no end how he can’t seem to make up his mind about which colour suits him best.

She thinks of him and it hurts, in a good way.

And that’s a problem she’s not ready to deal with.

~*~

There are other things to consider as well.

She can dream him up, conjure his hands and his mouth and his voice, and she can ache for him all she likes, but there’s no changing one simple, small, huge thing.

He doesn’t and never will want her back.

~*~

It’s not so hard, ignoring how she feels.

She’s been doing that for so long it’s almost second nature.

~*~

Except that, once, just once, she faulters.

~*~

The summer before her seventh year, she kisses Teddy.

It’s the first kiss she has with someone she actually cares about, and it's maybe the third or fourth break-up he and Victoire have, but it’s the first time he’s not really broken up about it. It’s an impulsive thing, nothing at all like her to do this, but there’s a _moment_ when they’re splashing on the pond near her parents’ house, both a little tipsy from the Firewhiskey James made them drink earlier, the sun warm on their skin, Teddy’s eyes crinkling in the corner, light silver, his smile big and contagious and she just –

She snaps.

She surges towards him, seventeen and exploding out of her skin with desire, and her heart beats maddening for him, _teddyteddyteddy_ , and for a glorious second he kisses her back. One of his hands curls around her waist, the other fists into her hair, and they’re touching everywhere, and it feels like she’s on fire, but then –

  
He pushes her back, steps away, wipes the taste of her from his lips with the back of his hands. Whereas she was burning up before, she’s frozen now, at this gesture. He looks like he’s been drowned, shell-shocked and shaking, and there’s goosebumps all over her arms, her legs. She thinks she stops breathing for a minute there.

He shakes his head, mumbles an apology that neither understands or process completely, and practically runs away. She stops getting his letters, doesn’t see him at all until New Year’s, four months later, when he’s at her grandparents’ house with a possessive arm thrown around her cousin’s slim shoulders.

It’s not easy, forcing a smile and greeting them like nothing happened.

Teddy can’t meet her eyes, Victoire is glowing from inside out, and Roxanne can’t look away from them with a horrible smirk in her lips. So Lily fakes a headache and hides in her grandmother’s pantry until it’s time for dinner.

~*~

“Alone again?”

It’s Roxanne who finds her, sitting next to a sack of flour on the floor, her head resting on a pile of boxes filled with something that smells really good and probably tastes even better.

“Naturally”, she quips back, but they both know her heart isn’t really in it. Out of all her cousins, Hugo and Louis are the ones she’s the closest to, as much as she lets herself be close with anyone, but tonight the first is too preoccupied with introducing his girlfriend to their family and the latter is busy pretending he’s not staring at Bettina Thomas’s frown from across the room.

“Hiding from the family?”

“Something like that”, and her cousin flashes her a quick smile before sitting down on the ground like it’s a throne.

“Mind if I join you?”

“Suit yourself”.

They stay like that, in silence, for a while. It’s not uncomfortable, even if it’s not exactly natural for them. Despite paying Lily a lot attention, Roxanne usually does it in silence and at a distance. It’s how Lily prefers to be treated, actually, and this show of support or whatever this is unnerves her to no end.

“I’m fine, you know,” she finds herself saying despite her best intentions not to be first person to start talking.

“I never thought otherwise, darling,” Roxanne says like she's a little bored, making a show of examining her nails. They’re perfectly groomed, cut into a sensible length and meticulously cleaned. Everything about her cousin reeks of being in control, and this is the sort of perfection Lily had always tried to achieve but has been failing at it spectacularly. Especially ever since that day in the pond with Teddy.

“You’re always fine”, Roxanne continues. “It’s what worries me”.

“What do you mean?” and Lily hadn’t meant to sound so defensive.

“Nothing seems to get to you”.

“I could say the same about you”, and it’s like she’s a petulant five-years old arguing with her mother about whether she could have Chocolate Frogs before dinner or not all over again.

Roxanne gives her a flat look, and there’s something in her eyes that make her look away, flushing with shame.

“We both know how people see us. How we’re...expected to behave”, her cousin says after a beat. “Some of us, like Dominique and James, excel at subverting their expectations. Others, like Molly and Albus, get crushed by it. Then there’s you”.

“What about me?”

“In the surface, you seem to conform. You never stray from the line, or at least never gets caught doing it. On the outside it seems like you’re everything that the only daughter of the Saviour of the World is supposed to be. But I’ve been watching you, Lily. Your eyes tell a very different story from your actions.”

And this, right there, is why she never truly felt comfortable around Roxanne.

With her cousin, she has always felt seen in all her naked truth.

“There’s a reason why you attract everyone’s stare, and it’s not just because you’ve got a nice face, darling. It’s because people, smart people, can sense there’s a storm brewing inside you. They cannot look away, too afraid to miss its début”.

Lily blanches.

There’s no such thing brewing inside of her, she’s made sure of it.

“People watch you all the time too. Is it for the same reason?”

She’s getting defensive again, but there’s something about Roxanne that brings out the worst in Lily. Her cousin lives to get under people’s skins, where she wants to do the opposite, so they don’t mesh that well.

“Not really. They watch me because I want them to. Because I know how I look, and I know that if they’re too busy looking at the surface, they can never glimpse at what’s underneath. That’s only for me and a few select people to see”.

“Like Lorcan Scamander?”

And for a moment her cousin visibly bristles at that. Anyone with a brain knows not to mention him around Roxanne, not if they want to still be in speaking terms with her. It was a very public heartbreak, and Lily’s not sure she ever bounced back from it.

It was also a low blow, and she’s suddenly very ashamed she took it. Especially when she sees the way her cousin’s fingers clench involuntarily on the fabric of her dress, how she makes a conscious effort to unlock her jaw, visibly forcing herself to relax.

“I’m sorry”.

“I know”, and she doesn’t say it’s okay. Lily’s glad. She knows it’s not.

“Do you know why I never dated until him?” Roxanne asks after a while.

Lily shrugs. It had been a point of contention on their family for a while, the fact that Uncle George’s daughter refused everyone that glanced her way, while Uncle Ron’s left a trail of broken hearts, both male and female, before unexpectedly falling in love and getting together with Scorpius Malfoy after Hogwarts.

“It’s because I never wanted to be somebody’s trophy. Boys chased after me like I was prize to be won. They put a lot of effort into wooing me, but none them bothered to get to know me. I was an ideal, a fantasy. Not a real person”, and she drums her finger on the tights, the only tell she has about feeling nervous.

“Lorcan – he was the first boy to ever take an honest interest. It helped that I already knew and trusted him. So, in the end, it was really easy giving him the real Roxanne. But he stopped wanting her,” and she takes a deep breath. “And that’s _fine_. He had been clear about that from the beginning. I was the one that got so wrapped up into how I felt about him that I forgot to remember that he doesn’t do complicated. Or exclusive”.

“And this is the reason I’m telling you this now, Lils. Teddy? He’s not there with you, he’s not even close”, and the words feel like a punch in the gut.

“How did you –”

“I’ve been watching you for a long time, and I’ve seen the way you look at him. You don’t look at anyone else like that. That’s how I know”.

She’s dazed, and there’s the old hurt again, that feeling of bereavement she felt when Teddy cleaned her kiss out of his lips and walked out without looking back.

“He doesn’t love me”, she says, and it’s resigned. Defeated.

“I’m sorry”, her cousin’s voice is soft, and there’s something like caring and real pain in her tone. There’s sisterhood in rejection. Maybe misery does love company, and this is the only thing she gets – one moment of stark honesty.

After Roxanne leaves, Lily stays inside the pantry, slowly counting her breaths, in and out, in and out, trying to calm down.

Her cousin, it seems, was absolutely right.

There _is_ a storm brewing inside her.

~*~

She finishes Hogwarts and her father’s smile is so wide that threatens to split his face in two. Her mother tears up but hides it behind a smirk when she gives Lily an extra-hard hug. Her brothers are laughing and pulling her hair like they used to when it was just the three of them against the world, inseparable entities that loved to create chaos and instil mischief inside their loving house.

Lily smiles in all the right places, poses for photos and bid her classmates goodbyes. She is sad to see this part of her life end.

It was comfortable, living in this contained environment where she knew exactly who she was supposed to be, what she was supposed to do and to go. Being out there, in the world, it’s not going to be easy. 

There are plans in place, of course, because it was expected of her to know what it was that she wanted to do for the rest of her life, but other than that… everything was just a huge question mark. Lily made lists, has little boxes she knows she’s supposed to check, but there’s this emptiness inside of her that keeps growing. She can admit to herself that those seven years weren’t all mellonball and laughter, but her future seems nebulous and sometimes even bleak now that she’s no longer attached to a script like she had during her years at Hogwarts.

Yet, she smiles and gracefully accepts the congratulations; answer copious questions about her plans and shows excitement about the next chapter of her life when she’s supposed to.

She’s had a lot of practice acting like the perfect daughter of the perfect couple.

There’s no need to break tradition now.

~*~

Things fall apart, as they have a way of doing.

~*~

It starts a few weeks later, at her grandparent’s house, on the night when they’re celebrating Lily getting into the Healer program, Hugo getting a starter position with the Department of International Magical Cooperation and Lucy being accepted into the Aurors. They’re the youngest of the family and everybody’s proud, keep talking about the good old days when they were just babies.

There’s loud music and the party’s pouring into the yard, the doors and windows of The Burrow are all open, the house filled to capacity. There’s a sea of redheads mixed with other family members and friends, Magic and Muggle alike, and Lily loves to be lost in it.

The fairies her grandparents usually use as Christmas lights are decorating the garden and there’s so much food that the tables are creaking in protest.

Lily is at the orchard sneaking a sip of Ogden's Finest with Louis, Rose and Scorpius. Al is talking with someone on the Floo, James is possibly feeling up some unsuspecting girl in the kitchen and her parents are on the dance floor being equal parts embarrassing and adorable at the same time.

It’s quiet inside her, but she knows it in her bones there’s something big coming. The night air is ripe with change, and Lily has a feeling she will not like it one bit.

It turned out she was right.

~*~

The fairies’ light hits Victoire hand just right when the girl arrives and waves at Lily from across the lawn. She freezes, that familiar feeling of having the rug pulled out from under her feet making its presence known. And this time there’s none of the excitement because this is not an implosion of her own making.

This is someone else’s doing.

She feels like her vision is spinning and she grips her goblet so hard it breaks, crushed against her palm. Rose gasps and Louis mumbles something about fainting at the sight of blood. Lily knows there’s a register of pain somewhere, but her own surprise wins out in the end and she just stare at her hands, shaking.

She wipes the blood on her dark blue dress and it leaves a stain she will refuse to wave a wand at it and wipe it away. It will serve as a remainder; she tells herself. A reminder of how stupid she’d been, thinking that maybe she could wait him out. That maybe, someday, he could grow to love her back.

She remembers her conversation with Roxanne months ago and feels so stupid. Her cousin had warned her about this.

But Lily – she didn’t want to face it.

We didn’t want to outshine the three of you; it’s what Victoire says. Still she smiles in triumph when everyone fawns all over her. There’s already talk about dates and flowers and dresses. It makes Lily sick to even think about it.

Teddy’s smile is apologetic when he wraps her on a one-armed hug, the first one in over a year and a half, the first one since that stupid, stupid kiss, and she can’t stop shaking.

Are you cold, he asks, and then sees her hands and says, shite, you’re hurt, and she thinks, yes. Yes, I am.

~* ~

Later, when she calms down a little and her hand is as spotless as if the glass and the cut and the blood had never been there in the first place, she feels even more like an idiot than before.

The engagement shouldn’t surprise her as much as it did. Teddy and Victoire had been together, on and off, since before her cousin’s last year at Hogwarts. They had had many girlfriends and boyfriends along the way, but always found their way back to each other.

It was destiny.

It was fate.

Lily’s own feelings about this development are both foolish and unacceptable.

She had known he would never be hers.

It’s just she had never realized he would get to be someone else’s instead.

~*~

That’s the night the thunder bolts and lighting start inside her head.

~*~

She gets careless and a little (a lot) drunk, so she shags Anthony Rodgers, a Hufflepuff that had been one year above hers, on her grandfather’s shed. It hurts, and it’s over almost as soon as it started. The whole experience makes Lily feel as if her peers had overly estimated the whole sex thing.

She throws up by her grandmother’s rosebushes after a fifteen-minute search for her knickers, the ones that got tossed around somewhere in her urgency to follow this irresponsible act through. Anthony holds her hair and gives her a hug before Apparating away.

When she wakes up the next morning, the only physical reminder of the past night is the soreness between her legs and the finger shaped bruises on her hips, deep purple against the pale skin of her hipbones.

They fade after a week, but something in her chest roars in triumph every time she stares at herself in the mirror and see them lying there.

It’s not over; it’s what the thing tries to tell her.

Somewhere inside her, the clap of a thunder echoes.

It tells her: this is only the beginning.

She looks away from her replica and pretends she doesn’t hear anything, doesn’t know what it means, when the air smells like sulphur and static.

The storm is fast approaching.

Any minute, now.

~*~

It’s not exactly easy, to keep going through the motions after that night.

But she still tries to check all the boxes. She moves into a small flat with a white kitchen, a white loo, and bare, white walls. She buys a bedframe because she read somewhere that’s what adults do. She gets kitchen appliances too, and an Owl she calls Sir, even if she’s not one hundred percent sure of its gender.

The Owl seems to like its name, so whatever. Lily counts it as a win.

But the thing is…

The whole place doesn’t feel like her at all. Her whole life, actually, doesn’t feel like hers. It should’ve gotten better, after school. She did her time and this was supposed her reward. She was meant to have time to figure herself out, to become the person she wants to be instead of whom she’s supposed to become.

But old habits are hard to break.

~*~

She absolutely detests being a Healer.

There’s so much touching. People she didn’t grant permission seem to think that it’s okay, grabbing her arm, touching her face. That the lemon robes mean she’s accessible, fair game. Their eyes either plead or hate, their words are either meant to cut or manipulate her into feeling their sorrow or gratitude.

She doesn’t want that, any of it. She mostly wants to be left alone, keep her head down, do her job and go to her house before another long day begins anew.

Every time she sets foot on St. Mungo’s, she considers pulling back. Every time she wears her uniform, her skin feels stretched too tight, too hot. But her family seems so happy that she’s doing this that it makes her pause. It makes her stay.

She starts hoping that this is a phase. That maybe it will come a time when she’s grateful to be working here, of being given this opportunity. But it gets trickier and trickier to believe that with every passing day.

~*~

She tries not being greedy.

She tries looking at Teddy and seeing another brother, like she’s supposed to. She grits her teeth and pulls away too fast whenever he greets her. She says nothing, only nods, a polite “yes” and “no” here and there to keep up appearances.

Being distant it’s a very difficult thing to do around Teddy. There has always been an urge to tell him everything about her, to lay her own life at his feet and his will. It’s so easy, pretending nothing has changed, forgetting her own resolution to stay away, to be good and compassionate and selfless.

To stop wanting what she’ll never have.

Lily’s been trying her whole life to not be selfish, not to take the things that don’t belong to her, and Teddy is just the first box on the top of a very long list that catalogues all of her sins.

So, she says nothing remarkable and instead makes inane conversation about the little things, lest she tells him everything, like she used to when she was younger. She wants to ask what he loved the most about his favourite book, or if he ever fancied a swim on the Atlantic Ocean like her, if his eyes changed colours when he was inside a girl’s cunt. If he wanted to do unspeakable things with her like she wanted to do with him. If he would let her kiss him again.

Instead, she grits her teeth and holds still and says nothing. Notice him noticing her pulling further and further away and saying absolutely nothing as well. Watches him running his hands through Victoire’s long, blond hair and tries not wish it was her own red one. Closes her eyes whenever he drops a chaste kiss on her forehead before leaving her alone, as he always does.

~*~

She stills writes him long, rambling letters.

She rips them up before the urge to send them gets too strong.

~*~

The night of Victoire and Teddy’s wedding is astonishingly easy to get through.

For starters, she starts drinking before the ceremony with most of her cousins, so evereything's a blur. She sits on the farthest row she can get away with, being related to the bride and very close to the groom. She stares at the palms of her hands through the whole thing, barely hearing their pledge of love, fidelity, and adoration. She marvels at the way her lifeline seems to blur towards the end, merge with the love one.

She doesn’t know what it means when those lines intercept.

She had always been shite at Divination.

She poses for as many pictures as she can, because for all she’s trying not to be greedy, she can’t stop being petty. She appears in every possible photograph with the biggest, fakest smile on her face because she wants to be all over the memories of their special day. She wants Teddy to see her laugh and wonder.

Sometime between the toasts and the dancing, he seeks her out on the dancefloor, but one of the Scamander twins’ smiles at her direction at the same time. She lets herself smile back, slow and deliberate, like the cat that ate the canary, the weapon she rarely deploys. Teddy stops, confused, until he realizes what's she doing. His face and his neck turns red, like it does when he's angry, so her smiles grows bigger, full of teeth.

 _Good,_ she thinks. Let him burn for once. 

She's tired of being the only one on fire.

~*~

She hopes it’s not Lorcan she’s smiling at like that.

She’s had enough of trailing after her cousins’ sloppy seconds.

~*~

It’s getting easier and easier to slip away from her own skin and slip inside someone else’s entirely.

It’s getting easier to do whatever the hells she wants instead of remembering what she’s supposed to act like.

When one of the twins’ hands curl around her waist, she knows she has him exactly where she’s wanted. She lets him take her away from the party so she can take him inside her house, then inside her body, and she moves with an abandon she had never allowed herself to feel outside of those hours dancing in the new Room of Requirement.

She doesn’t dance as often anymore and the rhythm is a little different when it comes to sex, but she still manages to find her stride. She’d always been a quick study.

When Lysander (and it’s a relief, realizing he’s the one raining kisses down her throat) squeezes her tigh, she rolls her hips just so, throwing herself into the way it feels like she is bursting out the seams, pain and pleasure rolled into one complicated knot in her stomach until it explodes and unclenches, hot and slick and primal.

She hides inside him, and she finds out that he lets her stay there, enjoys her presence, comes back for more.

It feels good, being wanted like this.

That’s why she lets herself want him back.

~*~

With that night, comes a pattern that dictates the next months of her life.

Around Lysander, she doesn’t have to be Lily Potter, the youngest Healer to ever be recruited to St. Mungo’s. When they’re together, he lets her do whatever she wants, whenever she wants. Sometimes they go out for dinner; sometimes he fingers her on the couch because she can’t wait until they find the bed.

Sometimes he will surprise her at the end of her shift at the hospital with tickets for a Muggle movie or a handful of Chinese take-out. Sometimes they bicker about what to do and decide to do nothing instead. Sometimes she lets him sleep over and play with her hair while she tries to falls asleep. Sometimes she kisses his shoulder after he takes a shower, and he hides his smile while putting on a shirt.

It’s surprisingly normal, and unlike anything she had ever experienced before.

It’s the closest she ever came to happiness, and it only magnifies what’s wrong with her life whenever they’re apart.

She doesn’t need him to be happy, and there’s still a void in her life that he couldn’t possibly fill. But he makes it easier somehow, to live with the emptiness.

So it’s not perfect, but it’s enough. Lily has learned early on that perfect was overrated anyway.

~*~

One night, when he’s sleeping on her bed and she’s pretending to sleep as well, Teddy comes crashing through her fireplace.

She hears the fire roar to life, knows that the connection is only enabled to family and close friends, so she doesn’t get scared. She puts on a shirt with a cheeky unicorn driving a car with the saying horn if you’re horny scribbled across it and the small blue shorts she usually sleeps on.

Her hair is a mess, and she can’t find her shoes, but hey – she’s in the privacy of her own home. Whoever is out there waiting for her has to deal with seeing her ugly dancer’s feet without complaints.

When she gets to the living room and sees a shock of dark, blue hair, her heart seizes in her chest.

They haven’t seen each other in months. They haven’t been alone in over a year. He had never even been to her apartment before.

“Hey”, Teddy says, and his smile is slow and unsure.

“Hey Teddy”, and suddenly Lily feels completely underdressed. She fiddles with the bottom of her shirt, pulling it down and wishing it could’ve been long enough to cover her thighs. Unfortunately, the action only serves to get Teddy’s attention.

“Cute shirt”, he points out, and she flushes for no reason before blurting out –

“It’s Lysander’s”.

Something flashes in Teddy’s eye and his face turns emotionless.

“Oh. He’s here?” His tone is aiming for casual, but his ears are reddening by the second.

“Yeah. Sleeping. He has an early morning at the publisher’s tomorrow”.

“Sorry for disturbing you at this hour then,” he says, voice icy.

“That’s okay”, she says, even though it’s not. He hasn’t even bothered to talk to her in a real way in years, not since that ill-advised kiss, and suddenly he’s at her flat, no explanations given. She doesn’t know what to think but she knows it’s strange, to say the least. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, really,” he shrugs, looking away, examining the knickknacks she has laying around her place like they’re fascinating pieces of art. Lily bought them. She knows they’re anything but. “Just wanted to stop by and see your new place”.

“On a Sunday? At one in the morning?” she asks, growing irritated with his evasiveness. She not seventeen anymore, hopeful and so in love with him that it made her almost crazy. It’s been two years; he doesn’t get to do this to her now.

He flashes her an apologetic smile, and she crosses her arms in front her chest.

“I don’t know. Just wanted to see you. We never talk anymore”.

“Whose fault is that Teddy?” and there’s the anger she had been harbouring inside for Merlin knows how long. “I kissed you, once, and you treated me like I was scum, or worse.” She stops, breathes. Her stomach aches, and she futilely hopes he can’t see realize how affected she is by that rejection. “Like I was the parasite that lived inside the scum”.

“Lily...” and he sounds stricken. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I never meant to hurt you. But you were so young, and I was… not. You took me by surprise, but I should’ve known better than to let it happen, never mind kissing you back. And I should’ve said something too, anything, but I didn’t know how to make it okay”.

There’s a sting of tears behind her eyes, so she turns away. She won’t let him see how he still affects her. He doesn’t get to have that either.

“Not good enough”, she manages.

“If anyone is the parasite that lives inside the scum, that person is me”, and she nods weakly in agreement. “I freaked out. I never thought about you like that. And you were barely seventeen, just a kid. I was twenty-six. Twenty-six, Lily. That’s too old for you. And I should've known better than to treat like we were, I don't know. The same age or something. Your parents would’ve killed me. They still would if they ever found out. As they should”.

“Why are you here then?” she explodes. “To apologize?”

“Yes. That too. But even if it never made sense... we were friends, weren’t we?”

She just stares at him from across the room.

“We were friends. I know we were. And I – I missed you. I’ve been missing you,” he says softly, like he’s confessing a secret. "You're of the few people I love talking to". 

Lily’s heart breaks. For him, and for her too.

“You’ve could’ve sent me an Owl, like a normal person,” she relents, because she’s so weak for him it’s borderline pathetic.

“I wasn’t thinking. I came across your letters tonight, the one you used to send me until -” until that kiss, it's what he doesn't say. But it sits there, between them, for a moment. "I just read them, and I missed your voice. I'm sorry, I truly am. I didn't think, I just... wanted to see you. And tell you that".

“You never do. Think, you know.”, and he cracks a smile at that. She finds herself smiling back, but forces out –

“That doesn’t mean I forgive you”.

“You don’t have to, Lil,” and his eyes are wet, boring unto hers like he’s drowning and she’s the only thing that matters. She loves it. She loathes it.

“I just want you not hate me anymore”.

The problem was that I never did, is what she wants to say.

“I will try”, is what she answers instead.

He stays long enough for a cup of coffee, which he claims to hate but drinks it anyway, before leaving with a quick kiss on her cheek. They talk about everything except the elephants in the room - their kiss, her boyfriend, his wife. If she knows where he is, and with whom. Instead, they catch up and fall back into their patterns.

After he leaves, she touches her lips to his mug, on the same place his touched while he drinked his coffee. _Pathetic_ , she thinks. But her skin tingles in the places they touched, and she feels dirty and stupid when she lies down in bed to sleep beside her lovely boyfriend but dreams of Teddy instead.

**Author's Note:**

> Trans lives matter, JK Rowling  
> Also I don't care if you own HP, it's my party and I'll write about angst-filled forbidden love if I want to. 
> 
> Reviews keep me sane in face of a dread-filled, pandemic struggling, Zoom-filled life.


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